Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Thursday December 28, 2006 @11:36PM
from the gross-conjecture-and-speculation dept.

Michael writes "2006 is coming to a close, and all anyone can think about (in regards to Apple, at least) is the upcoming Apple phone, but what happens next? What are we going to be salivating over and speculating about after Macworld? What changes are in store for Apple in 2007? No one knows for sure, but it sure is fun to take a guess."

5. Apple will break the 10% market share mark in new computer sales
4. The iPod will face it's first big competitor at Christmas 2007, from a vastly improved Zune
3. iPod will release a hard-drive free version of it's Video iPod, utilizing multiple flash memory cards to achieve 40GB+
2. Apple will release the iPhone, and it will be the must have phone of 2007
1. Apple will announce plans for a set-top box, integrating gaming, cable, and internet browsing

Apple already did number 1, it was called "iTV" at WWDC. (You said "announce plans" and that's exactly what they did.)

How about this one: In the wake of an accounting scandal, Apple is found guilty corporately of fraud and is broken-up into an Computer Systems company and a media delivery company. It'd be ironic that after all these years Apple got broken for shady business practices before you-know-who.

Um, I'd say that's incredibly unlikely. Corporate break-ups generally only occur after they have been recommended by the FTC or legal investigations as a result of Antitrust abuses. I'm not even aware of any lawsuits pending against Apple for Antitrust violations. "Shady Business Practices" are cause for fines from the FTC, and possibly criminal prosecutions of Corporate Officers. I'm also unaware of any company being forcibly broken up on such a basis.

That's why a fleet of lawyers is spending night and day to ensure that Steve Jobs has a cloak of plausible deniability. I'm not going to speculate on what he knows--that would be crass, and although Jobs is a sharp strategist (and corporate icon) I am not certain he would choose to understand any details of the alleged financial chicanery--nonetheless, should Apple be forced to oust him again for bureaucratic reasons it would be an ill-timed morale blow to Apple.

I imagine this will eventually settle under a legal tarpulin of promises and the obligatory fine. Still, any cracks in the Apple empire are sure to be more and more exploited by a press hungry for material. This is all we are seeing; it only matters for Apple because people pretend Apple is a "good" company, unlike say, Marsh and McLennan...

I'm not really all that impressed by the charges. Oooooh, back dating Stock Options to do a bit of tax evasion. That's some really nasty stuff there. As for Apple being a "good" company. I don't believe the Sun shines out of Steve Job's ass, but if some light tax evasion is the worst Apple's ever done (which it isn't) they'd still be a darn sight better than a lot of the competition.

........any cracks in the Apple empire are sure to be more and more exploited by a press hungry for material...

I must admit to being pretty amazed to see the Apple stock option headline marked in red on the Drudge Report for three days running. As they say, no press is bad press, especially on the eve of some very highly anticipated product releases. Go Apple:-)

I was talking to a friend of mine the other night, a friend who has had an opportunity to work with people at Apple to develop drivers for a network adapter or something similar. He says that Apple is horrible to deal with because no one knows (is allowed to know) anything going on outside of their department. Evidently the company has informational bulkheads everywhere, very likely so that, like in a submarine, a leak in one area won't take down the entire vessel. Having established a structure like thi

Can you give me anything about the iPod that's actually innovative, rather than "Same as competitor's product but looks sexier". They stole the menu system from Creative, evidenced by the $100 million license payout, and event their own patent for 'rotational user-interface' as been constantly rejected, suggesting prior art.

I just know they don't just throw _____ (insert latest gadget here) into a product as a checkbox filler.

Are you kidding? That's all Apple have ever done!

Heh, that's funny. There are lots of things to criticise about Apple, but they absolutely don't "just throw [latest gadget] into a product as a checkbox filler." One of the main criticism of iPods is that "they don't contain feature X found in many other mp3 players." Compared to players from Creative or even to the Zune, the iPod is underfeatured. That's because unless the feature makes some kind of sense and can be integrated into the "iPod experience" in a moderately non-confusing way, Apple won't do it.

Can you give me anything about the iPod that's actually innovative, rather than "Same as competitor's product but looks sexier".

Uhm... That's an entirely different question. Did Apple introduce anything new with the iPod? In a way, no. They took features away compared to other MP3 players, which is what grandparent was saying: Apple doesn't just throwin features left and right. What they did was make the iPod easy and efficient to use (especially compared to other players at the time).

So... you're not even contradicting what grandparent has said. You have a valid point (the iPod's features aren't that innovative), but it actually agrees with grandparent's point (Apple doesn't just add the latest fancy feature to the iPod whenever it gets the chance), as far as I can tell.

Apple iPhone will actually be a joint development with a phone-maker Motorola?

Maybe that's why Zander let Jobs steal the iTunes Phone show by presenting the Nano at the same press conference, because they both had something much better in mind...like a cell phone just a smidge bigger than a nano. I'd love that. Way to lighten up the Bat Belt.

Don't forget his Columbo technique of wrapping up the presentation, then absent mindedly remembering "one last thing" and announcing the biggest item of the conference. Cheeky geek that Jobs is!

I think iPods in 2007 are finally going to start losing steam, everyone who wants one has one, and they're very close to commoditisation. MS rarely succeeds at their first product launch (re: Zune), but launches 2 and 3 potentially will see a strong product. Samsung and Creative Labs finally have some products clo

Last time I looked, it was Dell that had an actual SEC investigation going on how their earnings were manipulated (known as "cooking the books" in the popular vernacular). Apple's options issues are a tempest in a teapot compared to those.

Or perhaps you mean the Hewlett-Packard hearings in Washington, and the possibility of jail time for their senior management due to their actions in nailing boardroom leakers.

So far as I know (and I'd be willing to bet as far as YOU know), Apple has investigated their options problems thoroughly, and is turning those results over to the SEC. To the best of my knowledge, the only indication of possible further troubles is due to a blizzard of rumors occurring, curiously enough, as Apple closes out the best calendar year in it's history, with a lot of pressure from various quarters to knock the stock down before the earnings are announced. Remember how the rumors surfaced about sales plummeting at the iTMS? Look how silly those rumors appear in the wake of the Christmas Day transaction volume problems at the iTMS.

I think that their product announcements on January 8th will easily eclipse any "stock scandals" in 2007, as will their earnings announcement the following week. And in any event, the magnitude of any impact of past options misbehavior will be shown on Friday (Dec 29), when Apple makes their restated earnings for the past several years public. All the responsible estimates of those changes indicate it will be a trivial change.

Yeah, definitely all of those guys he let put on their own dog-and-pony show at the WWDC Keynote this year have a very long way to go to come close to Jobs' presentation level. Especially that guy that demoed Time Machine, boy, you could tell he really wants to be the next front man for Apple, and boy did he ever fall flat on his face. The only thing that made his presentation interesting was the technology itself, but even then, I was like "Didn't IBM have this sort of stuff on the 360 years and years ag

I think these are the most likely to happen:
Finalcut Pro will come out with a Windows version and Apple will lose a ton of the market share until...
Apple makes themselves compatible with AMD processors too and increases their market share until...
China demands repayment for all the invested/borrowed money we owe them and we try to pay it off by sueing thousands of Chinese companies for making inadaquite, bad quality products and they start world war 3 over it and we all nuke each other and have to live in caves and the Apple market share dips a little until they put in solar panels outside the caves for power so ppl can run their Macs again:P
I'll give 10:1 if that doesn't all happen! Any takers?

I do strongly feel this may well describe the future state of the Macintosh in general. Look at sites like Mac Gamer [macgamer.com], and you'll see a steady decline in the updates to these sites since the Intel Macs went mainstream. It almost seems like the Mac game developers/porters have thrown in the towel and have acknowledged that the majority of their previous customer base would rather install Windows on their shiny new Macs, rather than wait the usual six months for them to produce a native Mac OS X port.

If gaming on the Mac has eroded to this lowly state, it can't be long until other markets are affected too. Developers of several popular multimedia/graphics/productivity tools that have maintained multiple code bases over the years may finally decide to kill off their Mac versions to cut costs, once armed with the knowledge that the average Mac user can simply be coerced into buying a copy of Windows and installing it via a Bootcamp-like utility. Before long, Apple may well have to break down and start to officially sell Macs with Windows pre-installed to remain competative in the PC market.

Eventually, being a "Mac user" could mean little more than "someone who uses the Mac OS for file management, internet activity and itunes, and uses Windows for everything else". Granted the integration may be tighter between the two OSes, but it'll still end up with Mac users paying royalties to Microsoft in the end... either for Windows, or the necessary APIs needed to ensure complete compatibility.

In a few years, Apple will be as generic a name brand as IBM, Dell or HP.

One explanation is that more and more people who used to be exclusively Windows users are now buying Macs in order to get the best of both worlds. Thus, the number of "Mac users who use Windows" increased. Seem valid to you kind/. folks?

Will the Mac game market suffer? Sure. The reason is simply: it's always been a really small market. People never bought Macs for gaming, but some Mac users wanted games. Porting games to Macs is a huge undertaking, so only few games got ported, and they always arrived late. Mac users only bought Mac games because they had no other choice (apart from a few truly great Mac games).

Obviously, being able to run Windows games on the Mac (and not having to wait for a crappy port a year later, if one is even plan

I think Mac for computing and a console for gaming is a good solution for any gaming needs.Plus a few deep strategy games for the Mac - since I've yet to see something like Civilization IV well executed for a console.

Anyhow, I share your worry that the developers will ditch their Mac branch if you can run any windows application on your Mac without a performance penalty and without paying for a windows license.

I also worry that running windows applications on your Mac will make your system more confusing to

You do realize by my username that I myself am an avid Mac fan, right?I'm not suggesting in the least that I personally *want* the Mac to end up as little more than just another Windows-running clone, but I'm not foolish enough to ignore the trends I'm seeing throughout the community. Apple wants to push the PowerPC line into an early grave. Once they have achieved that goal, all reason to support both OS platforms needlessly will die with it. They're all running identical hardware, regardless of the brand

Give it up, PPC is dead. Don't expect new software releases from any major developers (including Apple) within a year or two. That doesn't mean the Mac platform is in trouble, though. Sure, the games market is a tough sell because it's a social activity, and kids will do whatever it takes, including booting into Windows, to play the games their friends are playing. Waiting for a Mac port is not an option. Mac game distributors are going to have to do simultaneous launches or give up the serious (non-casual) gamer market. For professional and productivity apps, however, any non-native solutions wouldn't stand a chance against native solutions; and with market share rapidly expanding in a very attractive demographic of home users and creative pros, developers catering to those markets would be foolish to give it up like that.

I don't see this happening at all. I bought a MacBook Pro about 6 months ago specifically so I could run Windows for Web 2.0 compatibility testing and, except for the initial cool factor of running Windows on a Mac, I really have no use for Windows. It has literally nothing I actually *need* I haven't fired up Parallels in over 2 months as there's just nothing at all compelling requiring me to use Windows.

As for gaming, who cares? After people turn 30 or so, the appeal drops dramatically. Sure, the occasi

Its getting harder and harder to innovate in consumer electronics, and to have your product noticed. I have trouble thinking of Apple coming up with something as ubiquitous as the ipod in the near future.

OSX and Windows, working together at last - I expect to see Parallels fully integrated into Leopard by the time the OS is released, giving us the first OS in history (to my knowledge anyway) that will allow us to seamlessly run our Windows, Mac, and even Linux programs from the same desktop.

As a former longtime OS/2 user, I would always have preferred to run a native OS2 app than a windows app under os2. I realize parallels runs windows, however, by integrating in parallels developers could now decided t

Probably true. The Win-OS/2 thing was just an excuse for everyone (who felt uncomfortable about working on OS/2 software anyway, given IBM's hopelessness) to avoid something they didn't really want to do.

Still there were lots of mistakes, it probably did contribute to the overall situation.

however, by integrating in parallels developers could now decided to write ONE version of their software (windows) and be done with it

Which is precisely why there will always be obstacles to running Windows under OS X. I don't see Apple providing a Wine port, nor virtualization in Leopard. Can't have dedicated Mac Developers abandon coding under Cocoa and Carbon and let OS X die on the vine. The farthest Apple will go is to maybe provide a little "special" help to Parallels in the form of providing access to OS X engineers, but that's about it. They want -no- they NEED it to be inconvenient to run Windows on a Mac. An $80 charge before you can pirate windows onto your box is a pretty good level of inconvenience. $80 + a retail Windows license...even more convenient.

Oh wait, didn't we just have a bazillion threads about the Vista EULA forbidding users to run it under a VM. Why is that? Seriously, the answer is because it significantly simplifies any efforts to bypass the DRM technology in Vista. Just like Napster, Apple would find themselves behind contributory copyright infringement suits as soon as they provide virtualization tech and it is used to bypass DRM on HD or BluRay DVDs. So, this is reason #2 why Apple won't be selling bundled virtualization. "But that wouldn't make any sense to file a suit like that" you might say, to which I would have to reply "When has the MPAA ever been logical about filing lawsuits?".

From the article:"After years of speculation, the full screen video iPod will make it's debut just in time for the 07 holiday season sales push."

Can someone please explain to me what the market is for portable video players with builtin viewing screens, in general?

I see these at electronics stores and their appeal is completely lost on me.

When might I use such a device? Well, I suppose when I am somewhere without access to a computer or television, want to watch a video, and can devote my full attention to a little ~2.5" screen (so not when I'm driving). For me, that is never.

As far as I can tell the primary markets for these are:1) People who spend a large amount of time on public or air transportation, but don't carry a laptop.2) Young children of parents who are rich enough to buy them personal video viewing devices but don't already have viewing screens built into their SUVs.

Anyone? I can't even think if a reason to buy the existing video iPod, muchless a full screen model.

Video is overrated. BBC radio news, for example, is more informative than any broadcast or cable television news outlet in the U.S. Add in the daily hour long DemocracyNOW broadcast (or podcast) and you have more real, compelling news than you will find in a week of 24x7 Fox News. And you can listen those while you commute or work. Video monopolizes your brain. Not only that, but even old pre-1950 radio dramas are at least comparable in quality to the majority of sitcoms, dramas. and comedies on television today: i.e. they are crap.

Anyone? I can't even think if a reason to buy the existing video iPod, muchless a full screen model.

Since I own a video iPod (80GB woot), I can state my reasons:

1) I have my entire photo collection with me at all times. No more pictures in my wallet.2) I watch lastnight's Daily Show before work every morning.3) Video podcasts.4) I can share music videos with others on a drinking night.

HEY! I own one of those "mini TVs". Well, not exactly, it's a 5" LCD, but still, I don't live down by the river. I live in a house, and I even take a bath every Saturday Night whether I need one or not.

Sure I can tell you something about the market for a portable video player:

1. People who spend a lot of time on airplanes - and that's quite a few on a global scale.2. People with kids - since kids don't necessarily agree on what to watch, and they don't spend _all_ their time in the back seat of a Volvo SUV.3. People who use public transportation for more than 15 minutes or so straight.

1. Acquire satellite radio: This would allow apple to sell iTunes over wireless without a computer. Also, satellite radio use digital transmission. iPod can either do built-in transmitter or make it as an accessory. This would allow user to play their iPod on car radio (satellite radio) without wire and without loss of signal quality. I can think of tons of other benefits of Apple-satellite radio merger, but not enough space here. This will also allow wireless song sharing like Zune.

2. Acquire TiVO or offer similar service. Allow TiVO to download iTunes song and synch with iPod. Agains this will allow people to buy iTunes over broadband without using computer. Also, people can play their iTune songs on home stereo via DVR easily. This would fit in ther iTV or MacMini strategy quite well.

3. iPod remote: Make an iPod remote which looks like iPod nano. It can be synched with real iPod using a computer. Now user can truly do full control of their iPod using this remote control. My biggest problem of current generation of remotes is that I can't select a song, photo, video. I can only do play and then skip it if I don't like it. With a wheel and display, I can exactly select the song and then play. Such a remote should not cost more than 50/60 dollars.

4. External memory/battery module for iPod nano: Make an external memory/battery module for iPod which will connect to docking connector. That way, I can expand my iPod nano. How about 8 GB module for $99? Or a 48 hour battery module.

...is that I will continue to not care about it. The whole "compete by selling different kinds of hardware" model reminds me of the 8-bit days. It was bad enough when you had to port to multiple 8-bit machines. The only thing that's worse is game consoles. You have to pick which one you want to port to, *and* you have to be a company that's big enough to pay an arm and a leg to the console company for the privelege of developing on their machine. Oh please, mr. console maker, oh please let me write sof

Duh. So is Intel. That's OK though, because Intel works at the wholesale level. The statement is an incomplete truth: "Apple is a consumer hardware company". Having competing consumer hardware companies for say... CD players or radios is fine. They all play standard CDs and receive standard AM/FM signals (except for the new satellite radios, which are evil).

Why is this distinction important? Because with PC hardware as an industry standard, which IB

"Umm, no. Intel is a chip company. They've tried hard to become a hardware company, but haven't succeeded, as yet. VERY few systems ship with true intel motherboards."I guess what you mean is taht Intel wants to become a PC system company. Chip companies are hardware companies to a much larger degree than Apple, Dell etc.

I don't see Apple as a software company, but I don't see them as an hardware company either. I mean, the Apple hardware (as far as Mac goes) has nothing from Apple in it. Apple differentiates itself by smart software. The fact that they provide the hardware to run their platform doesn't necessarily make them a hardware company.Is Microsoft's console division a hardware division because they sell the 360s? If anything, the 360 is the most software based product on the console market right now. The hardware i

That's a very good way to put it. They simply integrate other technologies from other companies (Intel, ATI, NVidia, NeXT, etc) and package it and make it simple to use. Brilliant. I'd mod you up if I could.:)

Think you've got the last two points wrong. First, the range of hardware has nothing to do with stability any more. It might have done 10 or 15 years ago. Though, when the argument about stability from a wide range of hardware was valid for Windows, it was also at a time when Apple was using OS9, and the balance of instability from W98 on was probably in favour of Windows. Windows crashed more from hardware problems, but less from OS problems, and the Mac OS stability problems were greater than the Wind

"The issue is not, what Apple's current business strategy is. We all know what it is. The issue is, what it should be."And you, with your record of running so many multi-billion dollar multinationals, are obviously well placed to give Apple advice.

"And the issue is not, what is good for Apple."

No, it is what's good for their shareholders, as is the case with all publicly traded companies.

"The issue is, what is good for us."

If you are a shareholder, the issue is what's good for your investment in terms of ma

The only PC that even tempts me is the Acer Ferrari. Not because I'm a slave to status symbols or flashy logos (I'm not) but because it looks like quality. It's laid out well with great attention to detail, same as Macs.

If you ever buy one, you're going to be sorely disappointed. They're just like any other Acer laptop; cheap, flimsy and prone to breaking. Except for the nice paint and the prancing pony, it's really nothing to get worked up over.

Considering consoles takes billions to research, market and assemble I think it's fair that the console makers receive a cut on each copy of the games sold. If you don't have the money to support your own hardware business, I think it's ok if the hardware vendor asks for a cut.

Or think of it this way : if it weren't for 3rd parties, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony wouldn't produce enough games

Frm the article:"I expect to see Parallels fully integrated into Leopard by the time the OS is released, giving us the first OS in history (to my knowledge anyway) that will allow us to seamlessly run our Windows, Mac, and even Linux programs from the same desktop."

This would be a user experience and customer support nightmare for Apple.

Not to mention it would be incredibly risky for Apple to acquire and bolt on a complex 3rd party application at this late stage in Leopard development.

The author of this article is clueless. Which isn't surprising, considering it is essentially a blog post on a mac fan site. He's just regurgitating rumours from Mac community forums in order to get page hits.

I'm not so sure it's any more a support nightmare than letting the users run third party applications at all. You run Windows or Linux in a virtual machine, use MacOS as the display and window manager for Linux and add extensions to Windows that achieve the same effect.The problem is that Windows and Linux apps can only be superficially skinned to look like MacOS apps; they won't really behave the same way. This won't create a support problem for Apple because OS vendors don't provide relief for substanda

you know, i'm surprised i'm not hearing more about this. i bought a portable computer to be just that -- portable. so apple nixed the 12" powerbook and forced the line to the 15" -- i am now holding onto my 12" PB with a deathgrip until apple (hopefully) gets a clue and comes out with a 12" MB pro.does anyone have a clue why they supersized their whole laptop line? the only two things i can think of are 1) their market research suggested that people want bigger or 2) they need the space to squeeze in the

Me too... or rather I'm surprised I'm not having more of a problem with this.

I switched from a 12" PowerBook to a MacBook, and I gotta say... I love it. I too thought the "crappy plastic keys" would bother me, but 1) I adapted to them after about 15 minutes of typing, 2) They're really comfortable, at least for me. and 3) The PowerBook's keys turned out to be plastic too (don't believe me? Pry one up and look at the underside.

The glossy screen really isn't too bad, although I guess it can be annoyin

Boot Camp and Parallels are useful for a certain segment of mac users. Those that might have a site license for MS Windows and easy access to the media or other install material, or those that use MS Windows enough to justify the cost of paying for OS. This cost, which is already significant, is going to get even more significant due to the versions of Vista that we may legally install as a virtual machine.

What I would much prefer, as a casual user who needs to run minor MS Windows application, is the V

I'm predicting some jail time for a few Apple execs. Now that forged stock option paperwork linked to Jobs has appeared, it's just a matter of getting the legal thrash over with while they find out who goes to jail for being greedy bastards and who is merely unlucky enough to be within the frag pattern.

Having an option granted is a very different thing from exercising that option and profiting from it. Apple has disclosed an irregularity in granting an option to Steve Jobs, which he never exercised, and indeed gave back to Apple. Of course, they board did choose to compensate him similarly with new options, but there's nothing illegal about that.

One prediction that's been going round for years but has never really happened is the Apple Office-killer. Sure Pages and Keynote are nice, but there is an obvious gap where you woudl expect the spreadsheet and database to be, and those MacPro desktop machines are conspicuously overdue for a speedbump. I think Apple are saving up for something big...

I predict Apple will go agressively after the business market, this upgrade cycle would be the perfect time to convince businesses to 'switch', especially if iWork had all 4 expected apps, robust compatibility with office documents, and the pricetag of (MacPro + Leopard + "iWorkPro") is significantly less than (Vista capable pc + Vista + Office 2007), which seems entirely possible. Throw in the expected 8-core MacPro, a bit of dual boot hype and garnish with XServes, and it's a tasty package.

As for the iPhone and widescreen video iPod, I wouldn't be at all surprised if these were actually one device not two. A 360 degree clamshell design that's a very scratch-resistant shuffle when closed, a phone when 180 degrees open and a widescreen video iPod when 360 degrees open sounds like a highly marketable device to me, especially if Apple leverage their close ties with flash memory producers to give it good video storage space without a hard drive. Nokia tried hard with the N93, but they ended up with a rubik cube designed by a committee. Apple product design head Jonathan Ive must have been looking at that thing and laughing.

There are three ways to right click from apple. The old fashioned ctrl-click. Going in to system preferences and turning on the option so when there are two fingers on the track pad and clicked for it to act like a right click. And of course the Mighty Mouse [apple.com].
Personally, I use both the wireless mighty mouse and the two finger touch-pad click for when I am too lazy to pull out the mouse. Oddly enough - I don't find myself right clicking that often...

You missed one! My personal favorite is tapping two fingers simultaneously. Now that my MacBook has gotten me in the habbit of doing so, I find myself trying to do it on Windows laptops constantly. It annoys me to no end having to use the physical button to right click on Windows laptops.

Apple will fail to advertise Mac OS X again and let people think Apple is out of date and Vista is new and innovative.

I have to agree, Apple ads for it's Mac products leave much to be desired. The ads are not what made me purchase a Mac it was Aperture. And based on a sampling of my friends and family they seem more confused by the current Mac ads compared to the switch ads, and even the Switch ads left much to be desired. The iPod ads on the other hand, are excellent, and eye catching.

2. ITMS and the iPod will be targeted heavily by Microsoft. Eventually the iPod will be replaced just as sony list the Walkman/Discman fame of the 80s and 90s.

it wasn't so much the ipod replaced the walkman, but the.mp3 replaced the cd. apple was late to the mp3 player party, and the first ipods weren't even that good. but when they finally got a great product, it took over the market. as long as.mp3 is the preferred format, the ipod will always be successful. microsoft is determined to make their.wmv (or whatever it is) the standard and they are too focused on implementing their own special brand of DRM. ITMS is so popular because it "just works". and of course it does, ITMS, iTunes, and the ipod all come from the same people. microsoft will have to have their own store, their own program, and their own player. that will take a few years to get mind as well as market share. and even then, their size can't help them like it did in the office suite market. I think apple's biggest concern is not microsoft but current ipod users not upgrading.

1. Apple's stock price will flake out in 2007 with constant pressure from Microsoft products.

Um, care to name those products? Zune is a dog, Vista doesn't look much better, the XBox 360 is in a market that Apple doesn't even notice, and as for competing with Apple's iTV, Microsoft hasn't even had a "me, too" vaporware announcement.

I just received an Xbox 360 for Christmas and have to wonder is it not already "iTV" it streams movies and music from a Windows PC, it has a movie store (albeit a very limited selection, but there are hi-def offerings), it has a TV show store (once again a small selection, better than the movie selection though as it has recent episodes, and once again available in hi-def, it plays DVD's and HD-DVD's if you want to spend a little extra, and of course it plays video games, heck my Directv remote even has a c

Look up "YellowBox". Yes, it was publicly released. Yes, it did essentialy allow what you're describing (although it did require a recompile of software, it didn't require re-coding.) It was (thankfully) dropped, mainly because if it was successful, even in a state less transparent than what you described, it would have more or less killed Apple.